“All the best love affairs end on a Tuesday.”
Gene bumped his coffee mug mid-air against Alex’s, creating a loud collision, and for a moment Alex thought the noise she heard was her own heart splintering into pieces.
She had a tendency toward the melodramatic. Her father had said so. Repeatedly. But even still, she suspected it was true.
Alex put her mug down and shifted in her chair at the coffee shop that up until yesterday, had been her favorite. She rubbed at her dented thighs and readjusted her skirt to provide a better barrier between her and the lattice seat. She was so easily imprinted. By love too, apparently. She told Gene that, and because he was her best friend, he laughed dismissively.
“Oh, for God’s sake, it’s just love, Alex, not fossil fuel. There’s plenty more out there.”
Alex raised one hand protectively to her lips to keep from blurting out: But what if he was, like, the one?
She glanced over at the couple seated against a nearby window, leaning into each other as if they were trying to catch each other’s breath. Clearly, they were still in that tragically dishonest beginning stage. Ironically, she and Bill had skipped over that place on their way to a tragically truthful ending. Alex turned her attention back to Gene just in time to hear him saying: “…and that’s why it’s best to end a good love affair on a Tuesday. The shine from the weekend before is still there, and you have plenty of time to recover before the Friday night lights come on, my dear.”
Gene and Alex came from a small town where football seemed to be at the epicenter of everything, and Gene stubbornly used football metaphors in all of his life lessons.
Alex rubbed her eyebrows and then held her fingertips in front of her eyes. “I guess I didn’t need that fancy manicure you treated me to. I won’t have anywhere to go for a while. Maybe longer.”
Gene’s eyes widened, and Alex couldn’t help but feel more flattered by his genuine shock, than by the words that came next. Words, unlike emotion, can be disingenuous, she’d learned.
“Alex! Give me your phone. Let’s get that dating profile updated so you can wow a brand-new beau.”
Alex sighed loudly as Gene snatched her phone and pressed four numbers that combined Alex’s and Gene’s birthdays to make her home screen come alive. She wasn’t terribly anxious to start this again. Bill was the first man she’d met on that dating app Gene made her sign up for, who called for a second date.
She learned quickly that You’re taller than I expected was code for You’re too fat for me. She learned this when one of the first dates actually said the latter.
Bill hadn’t said a thing about her size when they met. Maybe they’d never leaned in to devour each other near a coffee shop window, but Bill had nodded knowingly when Alex talked about an empty childhood she filled with an intoxicating combination of food and guilt. He reciprocated with tales of a lonely childhood that he’d filled with imaginary friends and actual intoxicants. They shared pieces of themselves over the next weeks and then months, and eventually two years. The sharing grew into something she was sure was love. They’d both said so, after all.
But now it appeared that Bill had nothing left to share. He hadn’t wanted to hear any protestations after he ordered her a last salted caramel muffin and cappuccino at this very coffee shop just the day before and insisted on paying. He’d left when his mug was only half empty, after he mentioned again that she was likely to have a lovely future.
Alex stirred another packet of real sugar into her frothy mug as Gene continued editing and pinching profile pictures until they resembled a suitable candidate.
“Do you remember our junior year band trip to the Louvre?” Alex asked impulsively.
“Of course I do,” Gene said, while filtering and sliding.
The Louvre visit followed a year-long campaign of raising enough money to finance a five-day trip to Paris where their award-winning high school band was meant to perform for one day, and eat and tour for four more. Alex’s parents had shown even less interest than usual when she’d brought the flyer home from school. She’d left them both at the airport, with mouths agape, a little startled really, after she’d raised all the money on her own.
At the Louvre, Alex had a singular goal, and she’d grabbed Gene’s hand and pulled him, using her size to push through the crowd until they’d gotten to a velvet rope, a flimsy barrier really, in front of a painting that was, as Alex couldn’t help notice when they arrived in front of it, incredibly small.
“Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa wasn’t always this famous,” the English-speaking tour guide was telling a group assembled aside Alex and Gene. “In fact, no one took notice of her until an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia stole her and hid her away for 2 years, causing a scandal that made her much more desirable than she’d ever been.”
Alex stopped stirring her coffee finally. “Do you really think Peruggia made her desirable? The Mona Lisa? Just by hiding her?”
Gene looked up from manipulating Alex’s dating profile. “Is Bill your Peruggia, then? Has he made you more desirable by taking you off the market these two years? I like it. Maybe we change your username to MonaLisa02?”
Gene winked and went back to work, and Alex sipped her coffee slowly letting the extra sugar cover her tongue where it dissolved. She watched her best friend press save on the updated profile as she swallowed down the elixir she’d been using for an almost-lifetime to hide herself, just waiting for the precise moment that someone – anyone - would come along and find her.
Amy Impellizzeri is a reformed corporate litigator turned award-winning novelist, who writes mostly about good people who are hiding bad secrets. She prefers fiction writing to practicing law since she can be more honest in the former. Connect with her at www.amyimpellizzeri.com.